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| Peter Breugel, Feast of Fools |
Feast of Fools
Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the
Elizabethan period, Christmas was an austere and holy season, full of fasting
and stringent religious rules. By time January rolled around, people were ready
to cut loose. On the first day of January, Europeans came together for a
celebration known as the Feast of Fools.
The Feast
of Fools originated as a religious event honoring the Feast of the
Circumcision, which supposedly took place in early January. A lesser, more
playful festival, organized by the church’s sub deacons and falling on the same
day, allowed the church’s lower-ranking clergy to poke fun at higher authority.
Often the youngest or most subordinate boys in the church were symbolically
elevated to a higher position of priest or bishops, then permitted free reign
of mockery and buffoonery.
In this
respect, the Feast of Fools symbolized a social revolution during which the
normal order of things was reversed. Peasants became kings. Choirboys were made
popes.
Over the
centuries, this New Year’s Day party took on a life of its own. What started
off as an annual church-sanctioned festival evolved into a spectacle of
debauchery from which many of our modern New Year’s and Mardi Gras traditions have descended.
A Medieval Saturnalia
The concept of role reversal and excessive
tomfoolery has echoes of the pagan Roman festival Saturnalia. Ancient Romans
celebrated Saturnalia on December 17, but the holiday became so wildly popular
it ended up lasting seven days. This was a religious festival honoring Saturn,
the harvest god, but it morphed into a weeklong period of merrymaking and gift
giving. During this period, the social order was inverted and class
distinctions temporarily abolished. Public gambling, intoxication, and nudity
were permitted.
The medieval
Europeans took their version of Saturnalia to a similar extreme. The Feast of
Fools festivities were held in and around the church. Religious rituals, social
and religious hierarchy and holiday traditions were openly mocked, not only by
the “newly appointed” leaders, but also by all the townspeople. After attending
faux services, the churchgoers partied and gambled at the altar, marched in
lewd parades, and performed irreverent plays. All over town, people openly
participated in wanton displays of nudity and intoxication. In short, the
normally rigid restraints placed on public behavior were abandoned.
By time
of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the Feast of Fools had become a full-blown
bacchanal, openly condemned by church leaders as blasphemous and profane.
Hee-Haw and Pass the Wassail
By the thirteenth century, the Feast of
Fools had spawned similar celebrations such as the Feast of the Ass, during
which a young girl on a donkey, representing the Virgin Mary, was led into the
church and positioned at the alter as the congregation responded “Hee-haw” to
the fake priest’s sermon. Like the Feast of Fools, the Feast of Asses was
originally a Christian holiday celebrating the holy’s family’s flight into
Egypt. Before long its religious connotation was completely absorbed into the
big party and a pure donkey-narrative surfaced.
The most
widespread custom was to elect a young, male chorister, or even the town fool,
to parody the highest-ranking church officials. The Boy Bishop, as he was
formally known, was “made into” a priest and gave mock sermons. Again, this
tradition fell in line with the religious Feasts of Saint Nicholas or that of
the Holy Innocents, but ended up being linked with the Feast of Fools. In early
January, priests handed over their church for a day to the child who, dressed
in full priestly garb, presided over services. The Boy Bishop and his juvenile
entourage were then led in a drunken, colorful procession through town, handing
out lewd blessings.
The Boy Bishop went by many names in
different countries: the Abbot of Unreason in France and Scotland, the Lord of
Misrule in Britain, and most popularly, The King of the Bean in England. This
became one of the most persistent traditions in all its cross-dressing
bawdiness and utter profanity. It took a great effort for the church to snuff
out this custom.
The Bean King
The custom of appointing the Boy Bishop during
the Feast of Fools grew into the long-lasting tradition of crowning a King of
the Bean. A bean, ring or some other trinket was baked into a cake. Whichever
party goer was served the slice of cake containing the prize was named king of
the feast. To ensure fairness, the youngest child would hide under the table
and blindly assign pieces of cake to random people. If a woman received the
lucky slice, she was given the honor of naming the King of the Bean.
According
to Catholic tradition, it took twelve nights for the three Magi to arrive in Bethlehem
to honor the birth of Christ. The Three King’s Cake was served during the Feast
of the Epiphany and twelfth night festivities which fell in early January. This
celebration of the visitation of the magi was, like the other customs, incorporated
in the Feast of Fools.
Another popular belief roots the King of
the Bean tradition in the Saturnalia of ancient Rome. A low-ranked man selected
to impersonate the god Saturn would undertake mock magical ceremonies and
mischievous behavior during twelve days of revelry. This feast was meant to
predict and ensure a good harvest. In medieval times, the upcoming year’s harvest
was likewise forecasted during twelve days of festivals, with each day representing
one month of the year. In this respect, the King of the Bean is believed to be
a direct descendant of the original Lord of Misrule, the King of Saturnalia. 
From whatever practice it hailed, the sport
of crowning the King of the Bean via random cake selection was indulged well
into the Tudor era. The custom was abolished by Elizabeth I during the
Reformation. Today’s King Cake parties of New Orleans are its direct descendant,
as is the wearing of New Years Eve hats and crowns. New Orleans’s Mardi Gras and Rio's Carnival are the best examples of a contemporary Feast of Fools.
Midnight Cacophony
Throughout the history of man, it’s believed
that noise wards off evil spirits. What better way to begin the New Year than
by driving out devils and demons with a cacophony of clamor? During the midnight
hour of the Feast of Fools, children banged on doors while men and women rang
bells, drummed on walls and clanged pots and pans.
But no matter how profane and worldly the
Feast of Fools became, religion and superstition took center stage. The underlying
desire to purge the village (and oneself) of wickedness and ensure a propitious
new year was serious business. The New Year was greeted with as much reverence
as revelry.
Abolishing the past was vital in ushering in
a healthy New Year. A literal interpretation of “out with the old and in with
the new” was seen in acts of replacing old articles of clothing or changing
one’s home interior. A more symbolic folk custom is seen in the ceremonial Reception
of the Dead. Processions of masked people representing deceased relatives danced
their way to the feast then laid to rest afterwards. The masks were buried or
thrown into the water, laying their souls to rest. The spirits in return would
watch over the living.
The spirit of regeneration and renewal is seen
in ritual gift-giving, lucky foods, symbolic behavior and auspicious acts. A
gift of anything ring-shaped was considered lucky and symbolizes “coming full
circle” through the year. They consumed hog meat in hopes of prosperity and
cabbage for luck, both dishes becoming staples at the Feast of Fools. Many of
these centuries-old traditions still have distinctive strains in today’s New
Year’s celebrations, meals, masquerades, and parades.
The Party’s Not Over
The Feast of Fools evolved for a thousand years,
becoming most popular in France and Great Britain, but reached into Spain,
Italy and Germany. By the fifteenth century, the church had enough of the
mockery and put an end to the merrymaking by deeming it blasphemous and
illegal.
However,
by the 1540s the Feast of Fools was a part of the fabric of life. The religious
aspect of the feast day had been lost in the pageantry, but the feast's highly-organized
format of mock liturgies and playful showmanship is viewed by academics as the
precursor to the modern English drama.
Itinerant costumed actors, or Mummers,
carried on the Feast’s theatrical pageantry by traveling house to house, acting
out flamboyant plays in exchange for money. The spectacular present-day Mummer’s
Parade in Philadelphia owes its existence to these elaborate, medieval holiday
processions, which were kept alive by America’s early European immigrants.
The Feast
of Epiphany continues to be celebrated on the twelfth night after Christmas and
is traditionally viewed as the start of Carnival season. Even though the Feast
of Fools was stamped out in its original form, our present-day New Year’s celebrations
keep the festivities and sometimes foolish fun alive on January 1, a date that
has for thousands of years represented renewal and a fresh start. The Feast of
Fools never really went away.
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Is that baby Jesus in my cake?
The
King Cake
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| Cake by Geneieve Reiner, a.k.a. Ham Sandwich Indicted |
The English version of the Feast of Fools chose both a king and queen by hiding a bean and a pea within the same cake, which was decorated with paper crowns worn by the “monarchs”. This round cake made specifically for the season between the Christmas and the Epiphany, was nicknamed the King Cake or Three King’s Cake. The tradition has evolved from planting a bean to baking a plastic baby Jesus in the cake.
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